1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates m composing and playing multimedia documents and, more particularly, to automatically generating a spatial layout of the visible segments on a computer display screen.
2. Background Description
Electronic multimedia documents have become popular for storing multimedia documents such as encyclopedias and the like since this media is capable of storing a large amount of data, including text, graphics, action video, sound, and the like, which when combined form a multimedia document. The user of a multimedia document typically presents or receives multimedia information called fragments, segments, or multimedia objects, hereinafter called episodes, through the computer input or output, respectively. Generally, these multimedia episodes include information having a sensory quality that can take the form of audio and visual information like audio and video clips, musical recordings, speech, typed text, still picturers, drawings, animation, choreographed dance steps, and the like.
Multimedia authoring can be viewed as a process of ordering multimedia objects, such as texts, graphics, sounds and videos in time and space. A set of multimedia objects, or episodes, to which a certain ordering has been given is called a story. Ordering of the objects with respect to a story is done in the temporal dimension and in the spatial dimension. The invention described herein is related to the problem of obtaining a spatial layout.
A multimedia story may be associated with a set of screen layouts depending on how the objects are related to each other in time. We call a set of objects in a multimedia story that appear on the display screen simultaneously a CLIQUE. Obtaining a spatial design (or screen layout) for a clique may be a straightforward task for a small number of objects (episodes). But with a large number of objects having perhaps complicated spatial relations between them, it becomes an involved and tedious process to find a suitable spatial design, especially if the process is to be iterated, as is the case with many design processes.